Music in the Round Concert - Ensemble 360

Rebecca Clarke was a virtuoso viola player herself, and her sonata for viola and piano is one of her best-known and most loved pieces. First performed in 1919, with echoes of Debussy and Vaughan Williams, this lush sonata is richly chromatic, inventive and pyrotechnic. Schubert’s elegant Arpeggione Sonata risked fading with extinction of the ‘bowed guitar’ instrument for which it was written, and hence its name. This viola transcription draws out the melancholy and hope of Schubert’s intricate and soulful work.